Your last paper is particularly interesting! Not only the results, but also the disclaimer!

"The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): J.J.G., W.R.W., and D.W.C. have served as consultants and provided expert testimony in talc and other environmental litigation."

Ok, well good to set the context here.

But lets look at the results of the controls (no talc exposure) where the conclusions are remarkably cryptic, but I think we can figure it out!

The paper looked at tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients - a group of six who reported decades of talc use on their bottom and six who said they didn't use talc.

They used two techniques - polarizing light microscopy (very simple technique to look for polarizing molecules like talc) and then SEM/EDX which uses an electron beam and then measures x-rays emitted to identify exactly what the particles are.

"Polarizing light microscopy, as shown in the table, revealed a range of two to 17 birefringent particles per slide; these values are comparable to the lower end of the polarizing light microscopy results of the exposed patient"

Conclusion: using the same initial technique, we actually see the same particles (suspected talc) in the controls, but "at the lower end of the range for exposed patients". Very vague, but we can conclude they saw suspected talc in the unexposed patients but on the lower end of the range for the exposed. But that means the two groups overlapped in suspected talc particles.

Well, we better confirm those results with another analytical technique to confirm it's talc, right?

"Correlative SEM/EDX of the control tissue blocks showed a total of four talc particles across all patients: two in patient 2 (right ovary) and two in patient 3 (right fallopian tube). Of note, in Supplementary Table 1, both these patients had pelvic surgery more than 30 years prior to their ovarian cancer surgical procedure."

Oh crap! Those are talc particles in the tissue in the people not exposed to talc. Where did it come from? Oh, but it's probably the surgery they underwent prior!

Which on the surface makes sense - gloves, instruments, gauze, needles might have talc particles on them. Hell, all these tissue samples were removed and then handles by a lab as well - a ton of more exposure to talc is possible! In both the test and control subjects.

But anyways, yeah, it was introduced during surgery, that explains why we see talc in the non-exposed controls. But wait!

"Among the five patients in the main study, two had a history of tubal ligation"

Oh man! The patients that did use talc had surgery too! But the article doesn't call out the contradiction - if the reason for the talc in the controls is surgery, and your test subjects also had surgery, then you should find talc too! They just call out the surgery in an attempt to claim that with a tubal ligation, talc should be blocked from moving up the fallopian tubes. They don't even realize they contradicted their own results.

Jesus Christ this is a terrible, terrible paper. Written up and published for the sole purpose of trial lawyers - the authors had made plenty of money testifying to that fact.

Then on top, they do a bunch of hand wavy stuff to explain away the talc in the samples of the non-exposed, but don't realize at the same time they are explaining away the results in the people exposed too.

Pure garbage.